3 ms·

It becomes really apparent in web games. Some crude HTML5 game will need a relatively modern PC to run, while graphically superior flash game from 10-15 years a

It becomes really apparent in web games. Some crude HTML5 game will need a relatively modern PC to run, while graphically superior flash game from 10-15 years ago ran fine on a 500mhz Celeron

jlarocco 8y ago
To play devil's advocate, the Flash games of 10 years ago needed a modern (at that time) PC to reproduce similar games written in C 20 years ago...
- alxlaz 8y ago
  To also play devil's advocate: Flash was a great authorship environment, certainly far easier to write games with, and with better results, than C could give you twenty years before. Developing JS/HTML5 games is far more painful and unpleasant than developing Flash games -- it's a worse developer experience that somehow requires significantly more advanced hardware for comparable results.
  - jlarocco 8y ago
    That's true, but web developers did it to themselves. It's not hard, or at least wasn't hard several years back, to find developers complaining that Flash was ruining the web and needed to go away. That the results aren't as good isn't surprising. Flash was specifically built (and optimized) for interactive graphic content like games. HTML was originally made to display text documents and it's been a long series of revisions and hacks to get where it is now.
lxe 8y ago
Right? I’m surprised there isn’t more of this sentiment here. Flash did 15 years ago on a hardware from 15 years ago exactly what the “web platform” does now with hardware that’s orders of magnitude more powerful in every aspect. It’s embarrassing that Flash was left to die for superficial reasons.
- marcus_holmes 8y ago
  I dunno if they're so superficial. At the time it seemed a very real prospect that every single website would run on Flash, which is a proprietary and closed-source ecosystem entirely run by a single company with an API protected by copyright law. It wasn't just games. Every damn website had a flash animation that autoplayed and got right in your face. Flash was also used to bypass privacy controls, create un-deletable tracking cookies, and generally do bad things. Remember when we needed to update Flash every couple of weeks because it was so full of security holes? And they were serious holes, used by bad people to do bad things to a lot of innocent victims. And, of course, while we were downloading and updating the Flash player, the web was basically useless because every damn site refused to do anything until it could do it with Flash. No, much as I loved those games, I'm soooo glad we didn't go down that road
  - brightball 8y ago
    This. I always looked at Flash as better Java Applets. They filled the gap that Applets were intended to address but Flash was a much easier to work with. Flash, while full of issues, was sort of a prototype of functionality that people wanted built into browsers. It took a while for standards to catch up, because standards move slow. At the same time, people were motivated to make it happen because of all of those terrible things about Flash. We can all thank Steve Jobs for delivering the death blow to Flash to really force the issue.
    - badsectoracula 8y ago
      > I always looked at Flash as better Java Applets. This is kind of funny to see for me after spending a lot of time years ago trying to make some performance intensive games and stumbling on the horrible performance (and API limitations) that Flash - at the time i wished i was able to make applets instead :-P.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
Unfortunately this seems to be true of just about all software. I was messing around with KDE Neon on an old 8 core Xeon server with 32GB of ram and had to wait a second or two minimum for applications to launch and show their windows, but Windows 2003 on that box was so responsive part of me was actually a little freaked out by it from being so used to modern UI sluggishness.

It becomes really apparent in web games. Some crude HTML5 game will need a relatively modern PC to run, while graphically superior flash game from 10-15 years ago ran fine on a 500mhz Celeron

jlarocco 8y ago

To play devil's advocate, the Flash games of 10 years ago needed a modern (at that time) PC to reproduce similar games written in C 20 years ago...

alxlaz 8y ago
To also play devil's advocate: Flash was a great authorship environment, certainly far easier to write games with, and with better results, than C could give you twenty years before. Developing JS/HTML5 games is far more painful and unpleasant than developing Flash games -- it's a worse developer experience that somehow requires significantly more advanced hardware for comparable results.
- jlarocco 8y ago
  That's true, but web developers did it to themselves. It's not hard, or at least wasn't hard several years back, to find developers complaining that Flash was ruining the web and needed to go away. That the results aren't as good isn't surprising. Flash was specifically built (and optimized) for interactive graphic content like games. HTML was originally made to display text documents and it's been a long series of revisions and hacks to get where it is now.

lxe 8y ago

Right? I’m surprised there isn’t more of this sentiment here. Flash did 15 years ago on a hardware from 15 years ago exactly what the “web platform” does now with hardware that’s orders of magnitude more powerful in every aspect. It’s embarrassing that Flash was left to die for superficial reasons.

marcus_holmes 8y ago
I dunno if they're so superficial. At the time it seemed a very real prospect that every single website would run on Flash, which is a proprietary and closed-source ecosystem entirely run by a single company with an API protected by copyright law. It wasn't just games. Every damn website had a flash animation that autoplayed and got right in your face. Flash was also used to bypass privacy controls, create un-deletable tracking cookies, and generally do bad things. Remember when we needed to update Flash every couple of weeks because it was so full of security holes? And they were serious holes, used by bad people to do bad things to a lot of innocent victims. And, of course, while we were downloading and updating the Flash player, the web was basically useless because every damn site refused to do anything until it could do it with Flash. No, much as I loved those games, I'm soooo glad we didn't go down that road
- brightball 8y ago
  This. I always looked at Flash as better Java Applets. They filled the gap that Applets were intended to address but Flash was a much easier to work with. Flash, while full of issues, was sort of a prototype of functionality that people wanted built into browsers. It took a while for standards to catch up, because standards move slow. At the same time, people were motivated to make it happen because of all of those terrible things about Flash. We can all thank Steve Jobs for delivering the death blow to Flash to really force the issue.
  - badsectoracula 8y ago
    > I always looked at Flash as better Java Applets. This is kind of funny to see for me after spending a lot of time years ago trying to make some performance intensive games and stumbling on the horrible performance (and API limitations) that Flash - at the time i wished i was able to make applets instead :-P.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago

Unfortunately this seems to be true of just about all software. I was messing around with KDE Neon on an old 8 core Xeon server with 32GB of ram and had to wait a second or two minimum for applications to launch and show their windows, but Windows 2003 on that box was so responsive part of me was actually a little freaked out by it from being so used to modern UI sluggishness.